Hold Your Breath and Hope for the Best
by Reminiscent Lullaby
Summary: Life goes on and ghosts go with it. Gabriel and Nathalie contemplate reconciling their past as supervillains with the future of the child on its way. Sequel. Post-Canon.


**So, there's more to the story, it seems.**

**This is merely a prologue for the next (and last) multi-chapter installment coming soon. Keep an eye out ;)**

**Oh, and as far as timing, this takes place 20 months after The Beginning of Goodbye. **

**Enjoy.**

* * *

Gabriel stirred awake to her movement. His eyes blinked open to the opaque blackness of their bedroom and slowly adjusted to a flood of pale light streaming through the window on the wall nearest to him. Translucent white curtains glowed like the dress of ghosts and shifted lightly in a draft, while charcoal shadows matched their dance on the hardwood floor.

He laid on his side, his back to her as she rose out of bed. Quietly, he turned around and watched as she retrieved her robe, the movement of her silhouette sluggish and enervated. She untucked her hair and made for the bedroom door, rather than the bathroom, as he anticipated. Gently, so as not to frighten her, he called out, "Where are you going, dear?"

Nathalie paused. She turned her body halfway to him following the release of a deep exhale. He couldn't see much of her face but the shape of her nose, just hardly standing out against the deep darkness draped around her. "I've been awake for hours," she grumbled, voice raspy and tired.

Gabriel glanced at the clock. Electric blue numbers spelled 2:04 AM across the bedside table. "I'm sorry," he told her. "Do you not feel well? You should be lying down."

"No," she murmured wearily. "I feel fine tonight, and I've been lying down all day. I just can't sleep. For the life of me, it seems."

"Darling…"

Under her breath, she added, "I have too much on my mind."

"We can talk about it."

"No, I want to go downstairs." She opened the door but paused once more as she heard Gabriel getting out of bed. "You don't have to come. Go back to sleep. I'm sorry I woke you."

With a click of the light, the room was flooded with a warm yellow glow. Nathalie blinked rapidly as her eyes adjusted, and Gabriel cautiously approached her. "My dear, you know I couldn't possibly sleep knowing something is keeping you up." She didn't budge, even as he got close, and she did not protest when he slipped his hand over hers on the doorknob and gently drew it closed. Her gaze was lowered. In the light, he could see the heavy violet circles beneath her eyes. She was exhausted.

"Gabriel." She closed her eyes and hugged him, surrendering a deep, uneasy sigh. He hugged her back softly and kissed her on the ear. Her skin was cool against his lips.

"What's wrong?" he wondered.

"A lot."

"Can we please talk about it?"

She nodded in assent but chose to hold onto him for a moment longer, resting her face against his neck. There was movement in the child between them a second later. When they pulled apart, Gabriel rested a hand on her belly to feel his daughter's tiny kicks, and Nathalie felt for them too. He smiled softly, involuntarily, but her face remained cool.

"Is it about her?" he asked. Another nod. "Should we sit?"

Hand-in-hand they walked back to the bed and sat on Nathalie's side. Her lavender slippers tapped almost soundlessly against the floor while she played with her robe's unfastened belt. She leaned against Gabriel, head on his shoulder while he caressed her knuckles with his thumb, trying to rub the cold out of her skin.

"What's on your mind, Nathalie?" he whispered.

Her grasp on him weakened as thought consumed her. Several heartbeats ticked by before she finally spoke. "This has been really hard," she said gravely. Her voice pierced through the quiet of night, the kind of quiet that shatters with the drop of a pin, quickens the pace of the heart and sends ice like shards of glass into the back of one's neck. Gabriel shivered. He suddenly became very aware of the darkness brewing in the room's corners, through the rest of the house (which after ten months of having lived there, still felt so new). Beyond the black window behind them, the night shuddered.

_Really hard._ It went without saying. Gabriel ached for her, his wife that he so dearly loved, that he so dearly wanted to see smile, and not have it shine through a veil of pain. In August, just over two months since their move, they found out she was pregnant, a revelation that had rocked the house, least of all, Adrien. But quickly, it proved to be more challenging than they'd feared. Hyperemesis gravidarum lasted through the first six months. A couple partial placental abruptions came later, luckily, neither of them very severe. But it seemed to Gabriel that she'd spent more time hospitalized than at home, and he feared the worst whenever her jaw set in an agonized frown. April, so far, had been kinder to them, and if its kindness lasted, then the end of the month would bring them a baby girl, pink, wailing, and - Gabriel prayed - okay.

He didn't remember it being so scary the first time. There had been a thrill to his fear with Adrien; he was young and clueless and oh so lucky. They'd had it easy, and he wouldn't have known it had it not been for the last terrifying eight months of his life.

The only thing he could think to do was plant a long and firm kiss on the top of her head, squeeze her hand. He'd felt so helpless all that time, and so filled with ire at whatever force in the universe insisted upon her continued suffering. For months, the peacock miraculous had harmed her, leaving wounds so deep that Gabriel feared they would never heal. And right as the scars had begun to fade, something else had come along to draw them back. Gabriel had been able to take on none of it but for the anguish of his grieving heart. It would never be enough.

Nathalie sniffled and closed her eyes, running a hand along the curve of her belly. "I can't stop thinking about something going wrong."

"_Shh_. My dear. It will be okay." He didn't know that. His heart pounded as he spoke. The worst of it was behind them and he fought to put it out of his mind. "It will be okay."

"Gabriel." Her voice came once again, stark and haunted, jolting the room like a discordant bell.

"Yes?"

"What are we going to tell her?"

At once, Gabriel read the meaning of her words in the fear with which they shook. The force that uprooted them was memory, something which so violently and yet so elegantly tore them away from the present, so that they remained seated and still but for the quaking of fingers; meanwhile, a vicious gale cracked the boughs and unsettled the earth, and no one saw that in their minds, an entire world was being ripped open to make way for the things that had been buried beneath it. Nathalie's voice was joined by that of a ghost. Sometimes he could even hear it on her her breath while she slept, see it in her gaze as it comes with a surge of anger, and once, he had seen her look in a mirror and pause, noticing something in the reflection that was not supposed to be there.

_What are we going to tell her?_ Gabriel slackened, drifting away by a mere centimeter, but this seemed to dishearten Nathalie by a mile. She started to cry. Her hands flew up to cover her eyes as they released a steady flow of tears. Gabriel winced at the pang in his heart and tenderly wrapped his arms around her shoulders. "Nathalie, my love," he whispered as he stroked the back of her head.

"I don't want to hurt her," she sobbed. "I don't want to hurt her."

"Nathalie, please…" he said, holding her tighter, but he couldn't think of any other words to console his wife as her tears soaked between her fingers. He kissed her on the temple again and again until she finally removed her hands from her face and clasped them behind his back. When she had quieted at last, her breath easing and her head resting her head limply against him, he told her, "I'm scared too. Terrified."

"What are we gonna do with her? What is she gonna do with _us_?" She pulled away so that her face was a mere couple inches from his own. Swollen, watery eyes flicked back and forth between both sides of his face, each movement trying to pierce deeper into his mind, find the answer he wasn't saying aloud. But there was no answer. He simply didn't know.

Gabriel tried to swallow the ache at the back of his throat. Uncertain fingers brushed at the hair clinging to her skin where the moisture of her tears remained. He opened his mouth to speak, but he felt like he had run out of ways to tell her she didn't have to be afraid. Any parent should be afraid, but the things they carried, things they once survived, posed a brand-new threat with the same old ugliness.

She wasn't satisfied with his silence. Fresh tears clung to her bottom lashes, and her hold on him tightened as she tried to keep them from spilling. Then, she hung her head and said in a defeated tone, "We're terrible people."

And then the lights in his head went off. "You're not terrible," he told her. "We've talked about this."

She shook her head.

"You're going to be a wonderful mother. You're so full of love, Nathalie. You're made of it."

"And what do I have to show for that?" she demanded, nearly shouting. Any louder in the dead of night, and the sky might have burst apart. She raised her eyes back at him, two fiery blue stars burning with enough despair to melt away whatever would have remained of the darkness. "I was Mayura. I was a monster. I did it because I love you - I love you so, so much, but I-"

"Nathalie," he interjected, "No, don't speak of yourself that way."

"I knew Adrien was Chat Noir and I did nothing," she cried. The tears poured freely once again, and he wiped them away with his thumbs. "I did nothing, I did nothing. How am I-" she gasped, unable to compose herself. "How am I going to tell her that?"

Gabriel murmured, after several seconds of volatile quiet, "She doesn't have to know."

Nathalie blinked at him, hiccuping still. The blue flames in her stare calmed into something like bewilderment. "What?"

"My dear, maybe…" He adjusted her neckline, which had gone crooked. "Maybe it's best she doesn't know what we've done."

Despite all of Nathalie's terror, she found this to be incredulous. "You think we should lie to her?"

Of course, he hated the way this sounded. Gabriel's brow fell heavy over his eyes and he rose from the bed, pacing towards the center of the room. He looked at the door, thought of Adrien sleeping soundly in his own bed, thought of the nursery that lay waiting for the baby, thought of the house she would grow up in, and the city beyond its walls. It was a city that had survived the tumultuous reign of two tenacious supervillains, fallible only for the way two long years had worn them both down, one just inches from death, the other at the threshold of losing everything else he'd tried so hard to protect. For the second time that year, his hand clutched at the empty space beneath his throat, feeling for the memory of the power that used to be pinned there.

And then another memory seized him: in the seventh month, her first abruption had stirred such a horrid fear in him that he'd wanted, more than anything, to have that power back in his grasp, as if it could have saved either of them, restore the life he feared was slipping away. "Would you ever give it back?" he'd asked Marinette, to be told no, just as he'd expected. And once he'd set the phone down, a sick feeling possessed him. Was that desperate creature still inside him? Did it threaten to toss aside everything but the object he most feared for at the risk of destroying it all?

Gabriel scowled. He'd never wanted to destroy. _To save_ had been his goal from the very beginning. Sometimes he wondered if he could do it right. Sometimes he wondered if that could fix what he'd broken...

But it was too late for that. Hope, flimsy, weightless hope was all they had. Could hope save a baby? Could hope help an ailing wife? Hope was surely no miracle in and of itself.

"We are _not_ Hawkmoth and Mayura," he murmured, and the fragile matter of night recovered from minutes they had spent breaking it apart. "But Hawkmoth and Mayura will always be the enemies of this city, the same way Ladybug and Chat Noir will always be its heroes." He turned back around. She watched him sternly, drying her tear-stained cheeks with the sleeve of her robe. "This baby is going to grow up in a world that hates the people we used to be, and there is nothing we can do about that. Nathalie, how can I live with it if she finds out? How can I live with the possibility that she might-" He sucked in his breath, looking at his wife's belly, and his heart skipped a beat as he remembered how close the child truly was to them. "That she might hate me? Just like the rest of Paris."

Nathalie's intense expression had thawed into sympathetic warmth. "I couldn't live with it," she agreed, hugging herself. Then she sighed and shook her head. "That's why we have to tell her."

"Nathalie-"

"Gabriel, I'm _terrified_," she interrupted, and she demonstrated by holding out a tremoring hand. "If something went wrong, I wouldn't be able to bear it. _Fucking hell_," she swore, tossing her head back to glance at the ceiling. "But I know, I know it's going to be so much worse if she finds out somehow, some way, on her own. We need to be the ones to tell her."

"How else would she find out?" Gabriel asked. "No one knows but her family, and Ladybug herself. We can trust nothing will be said among them."

"Can you?" Nathalie challenged. "You want to leave her in the dark when the rest of us know the truth and live with it every day? Do you think that is better?"

"It's better if we're careful."

"It's not, my love," she whispered. "My Lord, I wish it was. I wish it was the right thing. I've laid awake for months hoping that I could justify it, but I can't."

"We're trying to protect her."

"We're trying to protect _ourselves_, and it's so tempting. Don't you know how terribly I want to forget?" Nathalie wrung her hands until she had cracked each of her knuckles. Still, she couldn't tame her fear. "I could have gone by entire life content with myself and the things that I've done had I always had nothing. But I have _everything_. I can see it in my mind, how it falls apart."

He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, as though he was trying to blot out the vision she'd voiced. Truly, he thought, they did have everything, and his mind whirled with the fear of losing it all. He had never processed loss well, nor did he seem to process his fortune. _How lucky we are, and to be so full of fear all the same. _

Gabriel stepped closer to her again, still blinding himself. "Nathalie, I don't want to ruin this. I can't do this again. I can't prove to be something awful."

"That will happen if we lie."

A grave silence followed. Nathalie, despite all her emotion, was capable of good judgement when he was falling short. It was dishonest, it was wrong, and it was flat-out _nonsensical_ to believe that their child could never learn who her mother and father used to be. Certainly, she would find out; certainly, her eyes would detect the light catching on the sleeves of the ghosts who trailed her parents' steps. It was like a blade through his chest, the thought of those eyes settling on such regrettable memories and seeing their faces reflected in them, vague like in a clouded mirror, yet conclusive when one turned to look at the figures standing opposite of the glass. Ashamed, they were, and unable to conceal it.

His deep breaths could not slow the racing of his heart. Nathalie spoke his name, and he removed his hands as he dropped to one knee in front of her. "I failed as a father once."

"No you didn't."

"I failed once," he insisted. "I can't fail again. I can't have this - this shadow looming over me every time she looks my way." He put a hand on Nathalie's stomach, and she placed her own on top. "At times, I imagine a world where Adrien wasn't the boy I was fighting every day, and I imagine that somehow I wasn't so weak as to wait as long as I did to stop, so blind as to miss what was right in front of me." He gazed into Nathalie's beautiful, earnest face, felt warmth spread through his chest just at the sight of her so close and so gentle. "I imagine that Adrien sees me and he doesn't remember my sins, because he never knew. Because they never hurt him as much as they truly did. I...I want that with her."

"Gabriel." She peered down at where their hands were placed, and then back up. "It's not reality."

"I can take consolation in the fact she was never here to witness my mistakes. But everybody else remembers."

"And so this story needs to be ours to tell."

"Is there a way to make it sound any less dreadful?"

"I might even make it sound worse," she joked, a bitter smile on her face. She lowered her head and shut her eyes. A sigh trembled at her lips. "Baby, your father and I did some really horrible things. We hurt a lot of people. An entire city full of people, and we hurt them day after day, because we wanted-"

"_I_ wanted."

"We wanted to bring back a person that was lost. And we didn't see how much we were causing others pain for it - no," she said, opening her eyes. "We did see. We did. It shouldn't have taken us finding out who was behind the mask of our enemy. And even then, my doubts weren't enough to stop me. I went on. I went on because I believed in your father, because I loved him dearly, and for the sake of love, darling, I hope you'll do everything, but I hope you don't hurt anyone the way I did."

"_We_ did."

"The good news is that it shouldn't be that much more difficult for you to be better than we are."

The baby kicked. She danced. A small smile spread across his lips. "Are you hearing this?" he asked the belly, and Nathalie laughed, or she tried to. He rose from his kneeling position and sat beside her once again, gazing at her keenly. "We have time to figure this out."

"We can't wait too long."

"Until she can understand French, at least," said Gabriel.

"But she must still be young. As soon as she can understand."

"And knows the importance of keeping the secret."

This struck Nathalie. Their liberty afforded them enormous relief and burden all the same. It was such a loud and violent secret to let so meekly die, that same ravaging storm leaving a wreckage meant not to be acknowledged. She leaned forward and brushed her hair back. The shadow of her arms left her eye in shadow, so that it glimmered like a dark sapphire towards the floor. Gabriel noticed how her breath quickened. He placed a hand between her shoulder blades. "Yes," Nathalie agreed, nodding, "Yes, nobody can know. Nobody but her."

For himself and for her, he advised, "Don't fret now over our identities becoming public knowledge. We're panicked enough."

"I fret daily. I assure you," she remarked, "there is no limit to how much I can worry."

"Yet, you're so reasonable."

"And I worry reasonably. Tell me nothing that keeps me awake is a cause for fear."

"You'd never feared death," he pointed out.

Nathalie went rather still and gave him no response.

He gripped her hand and pressed it, an apology for bringing up the subject. Looking at the door, he asked, "Might it help to have Adrien there? When we tell her, I mean."

"I think so."

"And we can work on what to say later. Should we draft it?"

"I'd like to be so prepared, but it shouldn't seem rehearsed. We must be as genuine as possible."

"You're right."

Her eyelids fell heavy. "What a mess we've made. The poor thing…" she muttered.

It occurred to him how exhausted they both sounded, their words running into each other, failing to rise and fall and cascade on any sort of rhythm of emotion. He felt all at once that he could sleep for days, and that he might never sleep again. After tonight, there was little chance of comfort but for the ease she gave him just by being at his side.

"Do you feel any better?" he wondered, "Or have I only substantiated your troubles?"

"Don't feel bad. I didn't expect you to have the answers." Nathalie stood up and lumbered across the room to hang her robe on the hook on the closet door. Then, she turned around and gestured for him to move over.

"It pains me that you're unhappy," he told her, sitting up against his pillows.

"I am not unhappy." The words rang hollow, and she cleared her throat. At the bedside once more, she kicked off her slippers and settled in the sheets. "I am not unhappy," she repeated more convincingly, "I am only afraid. No less so than I ever was. But you're just as afraid as I am. I can't decide whether or not that should console me."

"It's okay if it doesn't." Gabriel put his arm around her. "I've done this before, but there was nothing to run from, then."

She considered this with narrowed eyes, and her lips moved to form the shape of the thoughts running through her mind. Gabriel waited patiently, caressing her arm with his finger-tips, kissing the side of her head - if he could kiss the pain out of her, maybe he too would be painless.

Then: "Baby," she addressed, and she let it hang in the air for a moment, like there was any other audience than the husband who so warmly held her. Softer, she whispered again, "Baby," and went on, "Your father and I, we did some horrible things. We hurt a lot of people. It's true, my love, that we are not perfect. We may not even be good, and perhaps, you'll come to learn that best of anyone." Her voice broke, but she continued undeterred, gaze fixed out into the room and seeing through the folds in empty space where the mind finds color, shapes, and movement where there is otherwise none. "But, baby, we are not the people we used to be. We won't make the same mistakes. We will try, every day of our lives to be the parents you deserve. That means putting you first. And we _will_ put you first, and we _do_." She dropped her head against his arm, inhaling sharply. "Baby, I hope that's enough."

"We love you," Gabriel added quietly.

"We love you." Her eyes flickered across the ceiling, and they were absorbed for a moment by silence, later broken by her tired whisper. "Someday, I hope I have the bravery to say it to her."

"You won't be alone." He reached for the lamp to welcome back the darkness. All at once, night returned and cast its delicate serenity about their embracing bodies. Somewhere outside, a car rolled by, a soft wind rustled the leaves of the great tree in their yard. The room was still. The clock, with its ice-blue reading beamed ever so slightly against the outline of her arm. "You'll have me. Always."

"My love…"

"If there's nothing else that can soothe you tonight, I hope at least that helps you."

"It does."

"We can take this slow," he murmured. "First and most importantly, we have a baby. And we hope for the best."

Terrifying in its own right. With how things had gone so far, he prayed they both made it out okay. They had beasts to face when the time came, ghosts to look dead in the eye and spit at. A part of him wanted to reach out his hand instead, offer it a new chapter in a narrative that had ended too darkly.

But first, he thought, came new life.

Nathalie turned to lay more comfortably on her side, and Gabriel continued to hold her, resting his face against her neck.

"I love you," he whispered, and kissed her softly.

"I love you, Gabriel."

"It will be okay." And still, for all his hope, he couldn't know it.

But she believed him, just enough to fall asleep, and that was all she needed for now.


End file.
